My family has loved photographs for a very long time. Although they weren't very good about noting WHO the people in the photographs were, I have photographs and copies of photographs that date back to the late 1800s. For example, this is a photograph of my great great grandfather Torrance, my great grandfather and his brothers:
Obviously the oldest man in the photo is my great great grandfather. But which one is my great grandfather and which are his brothers? Who knows? And when was the photo taken? Well, my great great grandfather died a pauper in Glasgow in 1870 at the age of 79. No mention of sons being present with him on his death certificate. My great grandfather was living in Lancashire England at the time, on the verge of marrying my great grandmother. So this photo must have been taken--in the mid 1860s? Before his sons dispersed? It is a genealogical frustration which could so easily have been fixed if whoever first possessed the photo could have written on the back of it more than just "the Torrances."
Or consider this photo:
Obviously the oldest man in the photo is my great great grandfather. But which one is my great grandfather and which are his brothers? Who knows? And when was the photo taken? Well, my great great grandfather died a pauper in Glasgow in 1870 at the age of 79. No mention of sons being present with him on his death certificate. My great grandfather was living in Lancashire England at the time, on the verge of marrying my great grandmother. So this photo must have been taken--in the mid 1860s? Before his sons dispersed? It is a genealogical frustration which could so easily have been fixed if whoever first possessed the photo could have written on the back of it more than just "the Torrances."
Or consider this photo:
I found this photo among my Dad's things after he died. I remember asking him about it once and he didn't know who the people were. I think they are Campbells as my grandmother's side of the family, the Youngs, was a smaller group. And I think I recognize my grandfather as the young man directly behind the bride (if she is the bride)--the one that looks a bit like Harry Potter. I don't see my grandmother in the photo.
Whose wedding was it though? Are the elderly folk to the right of the groom my great grandparents? Who knows?
This is a photo of one of my grandfather's brothers who was killed in World War 1 (he worked in a butcher's shop):
Maybe he is in the photo of the wedding but I don't recognize him. Or maybe that could be him on the far right, second row. The nose is distinctive. How about Sylvester, another great uncle. I have a very faded photo of him thanks to a second cousin:
The photo is so grainy that I can't find him in the wedding photo either. Poor Uncle Vest (yes, my father remembered that he had an uncle named "Vest.") Married three times, none very happily according to Cousin Enid whom I met in Glasgow thanks to an Ancestry query 12 years ago. She's gone now. According to Enid, Vest drifted from job to job. The irony was that about 14 years ago Richard and I rented a cottage with Sheila and Laurie in Aberfeldy, Scotland for a week while we toured around the area. We didn't know it then but Uncle Vest's grave is in Aberfeldy. Would have been nice to visit him.
My grandfather gave my mother her first camera when she was 20--one of those old Brownies, looked like this:
Mom loved to take photos. I remember watching her at the kitchen table, sorting through her snaps, choosing those she liked the best, then applying the little black corners, licking them and sticking the photos into her album--the kind that had black paper. She would write her captions with a special silver or white ink pen. She had several albums that for years after Dad died I hauled around with me. Finally I realized that it was in a way silly to be hauling around books of photos of people I didn't know. As I said before, Mom might caption a photo "Brome Lake 1942" but not say who the people were in the photo.
So I broke the albums apart (they were starting to fall apart anyway) and kept those photos that meant something to me.
It is sad in a way but I think sometimes we can just hold on too hard to memories that really aren't a part of our own memory book. I kept those photos of relatives that I have memories of and I LABELLED the back of them so that Laurie and the grandchildren will know who we are. And they are in a box back in our storage unit in Sierra Vista. I am SO glad I didn't bring them with me in the ill-fated luggage.
Which brings me to the present and the photographic legacy I am leaving. I have over 5,000 photos in my computer. About half of them have been passed along in some way--Facebook, this blog, another blog I had before I moved to this one, http://valretire.blogspot.ie. Others are just there because I haven't got organized enough to cull them. Several people know where this blog is so that, if anything happened to me, they will still be able to access it. Laurie and the children haven't shown a lot of interest in family history yet (they know I can answer all their questions and show them where the information is) but when they do, they will be able to find the genealogy I have discovered to date in ancestry.com (about 2,300 people, it includes all of Richard's pioneer ancestry) and also in familysearch.org. I have been moving all of the information slowly off Ancestry because it is a "for pay" site whereas FamilySearch is free. And will remain free. Anyone reading my blog can find information about my parents if they type in Mary Josephine Torrance or Arnold David Campbell in Search and, from that, information about all of their siblings, parents, grandparents. As far as I have been able to track. You won't find mine or Richard's or any living relatives there--there are, thank goodness, privacy issues.
My point is that the legacy I leave will live on without my presence. I have left breadcrumbs to who I was, where I came from, what life was like for me, my parents, my grandparents. My parents' and grandparents' legacies are really only contained in me and my three female cousins--one paternal, two maternal--now. They left no written history. Part of that was a decision on their part NOT to share their family secrets. My cousins and I are the last of the Harold Torrance, Donald Peter Campbell, Annie Young Wighton, Mary Cate O'Reilly branches. It's a sobering thought to think that history is in our hands.
Whose wedding was it though? Are the elderly folk to the right of the groom my great grandparents? Who knows?
This is a photo of one of my grandfather's brothers who was killed in World War 1 (he worked in a butcher's shop):
Maybe he is in the photo of the wedding but I don't recognize him. Or maybe that could be him on the far right, second row. The nose is distinctive. How about Sylvester, another great uncle. I have a very faded photo of him thanks to a second cousin:
The photo is so grainy that I can't find him in the wedding photo either. Poor Uncle Vest (yes, my father remembered that he had an uncle named "Vest.") Married three times, none very happily according to Cousin Enid whom I met in Glasgow thanks to an Ancestry query 12 years ago. She's gone now. According to Enid, Vest drifted from job to job. The irony was that about 14 years ago Richard and I rented a cottage with Sheila and Laurie in Aberfeldy, Scotland for a week while we toured around the area. We didn't know it then but Uncle Vest's grave is in Aberfeldy. Would have been nice to visit him.
My grandfather gave my mother her first camera when she was 20--one of those old Brownies, looked like this:
Mom loved to take photos. I remember watching her at the kitchen table, sorting through her snaps, choosing those she liked the best, then applying the little black corners, licking them and sticking the photos into her album--the kind that had black paper. She would write her captions with a special silver or white ink pen. She had several albums that for years after Dad died I hauled around with me. Finally I realized that it was in a way silly to be hauling around books of photos of people I didn't know. As I said before, Mom might caption a photo "Brome Lake 1942" but not say who the people were in the photo.
So I broke the albums apart (they were starting to fall apart anyway) and kept those photos that meant something to me.
It is sad in a way but I think sometimes we can just hold on too hard to memories that really aren't a part of our own memory book. I kept those photos of relatives that I have memories of and I LABELLED the back of them so that Laurie and the grandchildren will know who we are. And they are in a box back in our storage unit in Sierra Vista. I am SO glad I didn't bring them with me in the ill-fated luggage.
Which brings me to the present and the photographic legacy I am leaving. I have over 5,000 photos in my computer. About half of them have been passed along in some way--Facebook, this blog, another blog I had before I moved to this one, http://valretire.blogspot.ie. Others are just there because I haven't got organized enough to cull them. Several people know where this blog is so that, if anything happened to me, they will still be able to access it. Laurie and the children haven't shown a lot of interest in family history yet (they know I can answer all their questions and show them where the information is) but when they do, they will be able to find the genealogy I have discovered to date in ancestry.com (about 2,300 people, it includes all of Richard's pioneer ancestry) and also in familysearch.org. I have been moving all of the information slowly off Ancestry because it is a "for pay" site whereas FamilySearch is free. And will remain free. Anyone reading my blog can find information about my parents if they type in Mary Josephine Torrance or Arnold David Campbell in Search and, from that, information about all of their siblings, parents, grandparents. As far as I have been able to track. You won't find mine or Richard's or any living relatives there--there are, thank goodness, privacy issues.
My point is that the legacy I leave will live on without my presence. I have left breadcrumbs to who I was, where I came from, what life was like for me, my parents, my grandparents. My parents' and grandparents' legacies are really only contained in me and my three female cousins--one paternal, two maternal--now. They left no written history. Part of that was a decision on their part NOT to share their family secrets. My cousins and I are the last of the Harold Torrance, Donald Peter Campbell, Annie Young Wighton, Mary Cate O'Reilly branches. It's a sobering thought to think that history is in our hands.
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